The University of Big Disappointments

During a recent visit to the University of East Anglia (UEA) I recalled my first sight of it in 1966 when I was 14. I remember it well: I was cycling with a friend along Colney lane one spring day. This lane overlooks the Yare valley in which the university is situated. As we cycled along the lane a gap opened up in the hedge and revealed a vista across the valley and a panoramic view of the huge university complex spread out below us. At that stage no news of its construction had reached me and so it was a complete surprise. Nearby Norwich, where I lived, is a medieval town with an unsystematic warren of ancient narrow streets lined, by and large, with a hodge-podge of old and traditional looking buildings. The sudden and unexpected appearance of this radically modern building was the shock of the new. With raised walkways and its clean unusual elemental architecture it could have been a scene from 60s sci-fi: Perhaps I was looking at some precognitive vision of Norwich as it would look in the centuries to come, or perhaps aliens had come to Earth and started building a city in the rural hinter land of Norwich. For a teenager who was well into science, technology and progress this building was like seeing the future now. It was an exciting place; an ultra modern factory of knowledge and science, the cutting edge of progress.

But now whenever I visit the University with its streaked and stained concrete surfaces a slightly somber mood hangs over the place, a mood very similar to that which I associate with my visits to Sizewell ‘A’ nuclear power station. Just like Sizewell ‘A’ power station UEA is symbolic of many of my childhood hopes and dreams connected with 60s modernism. I was in my teens in the second half of the sixties so perhaps I can be excused of a youthful optimism that bought into the modernist dreams of the sixties. In particular I was convinced that when I got older:

1. Everything would be atomic powered and electricity would be too cheap to meter. In any case I believed practical fusion power to be just round the corner.

2. There would be regular tourist flights to the moon. The American moon program was well under way and gave credence to such a notion.

3. Artificial intelligence would be on a par with human intelligence.

4. Physicists would have discovered a theory of everything.

Of course, none of these dreams have been fulfilled: Atomic power has many hidden costs and has been dogged by an almost superstitious dread that nuclear energy is akin to promethean fire. The problems with fusion power have and remain very difficult to crack. Space travel is an enormously expensive investment and (unlike the Columbian frontier) holds little prospect of an economic payback. Marvin Minski’s AI triumphalism has been replaced by a successor who says that our attempts to emulate human level AI may resemble an ape climbing a tree and thinking he has made the first steps to the moon. Human beings may not be bright enough to solve the problems needed to implement human level AI. That may also go for a Theory of Everything: as the quip goes, String Theory seems to be smarter than we are.

The modernist optimism of the sixties is understandable: Given the enormous strides in flight, transport, electronics, space travel, computers, warfare, biochemistry and physics that had been made in my father’s life time between 1912 and 2004 it is easy to forget that an unexpected law of diminishing returns can kick in anytime. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb rightly warns us, straight extrapolation is always a dangerous thing in the face of non-linearities and the utterly unforeseeable. The hidden costs of atomic power could never have been guessed at and who would have anticipated the postmodern diffidence associated with science and hi-tech. The distances between the staging posts of outer-space increases exponentially and defies the divide and conquer strategy of incremental space hopping. Human level AI may be up against staggering complexities that we have little hope of emulating. And is there any a priori reason why the fundamental physics of the cosmos should prove scientifically and intellectually tractable?

All good reason, then, to throw oneself on the providence of God you might think, a providence encoded perhaps in the apparently random. Well yes, I agree, but then don’t forget what religion has offered us recently: the Toronto blessing, gold fillings, Benny Hinn, Todd Bentley, bullying authoritarianism, religious cults, spiritual spin, crowd hysterics, Young Earth Creationism, dogmatic theological casuistry, an assortment of conspiracy theorists, Barry Smith’s failed millennium prognostications, failed prophecies, failed healings, gnosto-dualism, legalism, fideism…. Religion has no grounds to crow.